"No." She answered without even thinking. It was what he had expected. He glanced around and saw the supervisor had moved a little closer. He was a large, black-haired man with a sullen face. Evan hoped she was not going to be docked pay for the time he had taken, but he thought she probably would. He would waste no more of it.

"Thank you. Goodbye.”

She said nothing, but returned silently to her work.

Evan and Shotts went back to the alley and spoke to Jimmy Elders and his common-law wife, but they had nothing to offer, beyond corroborating what Daisy Mott had told them. He denied having seen either of the men alive, or knowing what they might have been doing there. The leer in his face suggested the obvious, but he refrained from putting words to it. Briggs was the same.

They spent all day in and around the alley which was known as Water Lane, going up and down narrow and rotting stairs, into rooms where sometimes a whole family lived, others where pale-faced young prostitutes conducted their business when it was too wet or too cold outside. They went down to cellars where women of all ages sat in candlelight stitching, and children of two or three years old played in straw and tied waste bits of rag into dolls. Older children unpicked old clothes for the fabric to make new ones.

No one admitted to having seen or heard anything unusual. No one knew anything of two strangers in the area. There were always people coming and going. There were pawn shops, fencers of stolen goods, petty forgers of documents, doss houses, gin mills and well-hidden rooms where it was safe for a wanted man to lie for a while. The two men could have come to do business with any of these, or none. They may simply have been entertaining themselves by looking on at a way of life different from their own, and immeasurably inferior. They could even have been misguided preachers come to save sinners from themselves, and been attacked for their presumption and their interference.